Just when you thought theatre couldn’t possibly mine more from the internet’s underbelly, The Last Incel slides into London’s DMs — and straight onto the Pleasance Theatre stage. After a buzzy Edinburgh Fringe run (and a Popcorn x BBC New Writing Award shortlist to its name), Jamie Sykes’ twisted digital dark comedy is firing up the discourse once more — with trollish glee and pixel-perfect precision.
It’s Black Mirror with better jokes. And worse usernames
At the centre of the show is “Cuckboy” (yes, really) and his motley crew of terminally online bros — “Ghost”, “Crusher”, and the tragically misnamed “Einstain”. Together they stew in their own algorithm-fed misery until a seismic disruption shatters their online echo chamber: one of them sleeps with a woman. Enter Margaret — a journalist, moral compass, and accidental catalyst for a total ideological meltdown.
Framed (literally) as a video call, The Last Incel is part absurdist Zoom comedy, part social commentary, and entirely unnerving. It uses dance, Irish wit, and abstract staging to make the unspeakable not just speakable, but darkly funny. This is theatre that dares to humanise without excusing — and lets satire do the heavy lifting where moralising would fail.
Director/writer Jamie Sykes says he was drawn to the comedy lurking in the contradictions of incel ideology. “What could be more tragically ironic,” he asks, “than men who want sex so badly, they become violently opposed to everything that might lead to it?” It's a biting line — and a perfect summary of the show’s DNA: equal parts empathy and evisceration.
With support from Culture Ireland and the endorsement of Mervyn Stutter’s Pick of the Fringe, this isn’t just fringe-for-the-sake-of-fringe. The Last Incel manages to translate the horrors of Reddit threads and 4chan screeds into something uncomfortably recognisable — and very, very watchable.
It’s Black Mirror with better jokes. And worse usernames.
Catch The Last Incel at the Pleasance Theatre in North London, 14–31 May. And yes — it’s okay to laugh (nervously).
